San Francisco - In a victory for users, WhatsApp has fixed a long-standing privacy problem in group messaging, where users could be added to a group without their permission. The issue was one of the targets of “Fix It Already!,” a campaign from the Electronic Frontier Foundation … | Continue reading
by Sophia Cope, Amul Kalia, Seth Schoen, and Adam SchwartzDownload the report as a PDF.EXECUTIVE SUMMARYThe U.S. government reported a five-fold increase in the number of electronic media searches at the border in a single year, from 4,764 in 2015 to 23,877 in 2016.[fn] Gillian F … | Continue reading
Last week, we filed an amicus brief in U.S. v. Wilson, a federal appellate case, in which we argued that email providers’ terms of service can’t limit your Fourth Amendment rights. This is the second brief we’ve filed in less than a year addressing this important point.Email and … | Continue reading
This past weekend, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the pages of the Washington Post to ask governments and regulators to play a more active role in policing the Internet, and to offer some ideas for how they should do so. As the New York Times noted, Zuckerberg’s comments we … | Continue reading
EFF and the ACLU of Northern California urged a California appeals court last week to reverse a judge’s wrongheaded and dangerous ruling that threatens the critical privacy protections afforded by the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA), the most robust dig … | Continue reading
Analyzing and indefinitely keeping the DNA profiles of thousands of Californians arrested for felonies, but never charged with a crime, is not just an ominously overbroad practice by law enforcement—it’s an invasion of privacy that violates the state’s constitution. Last year we … | Continue reading
At a time when we are fighting to keep the future of broadband access from reverting back towards a monopoly, it seems implausible that a legislator would suggest their state should follow the Federal Communications Commission’s lead to abandon oversight over a highly concentrate … | Continue reading
Some of the most fruitful conversations we can have are about nuanced, sensitive, and political topics, and no matter who or where we are, the Internet has given us the space to do that. Across the world, an unrestricted Internet connection allows us to gather in online communiti … | Continue reading
A federal court’s ruling earlier this week has blunted a key provision of the surveillance reform law that required the government to be more transparent about legal decisions made by the United States secret surveillance court.After Edward Snowden revealed the government’s ongoi … | Continue reading
Oakland, California—On Friday, March 29, at 9:00 am, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will tell a federal court that its clients should be allowed to proceed with their case challenging the constitutionality of NSA spying. The government’s latest attempts to prevent the c … | Continue reading
A bill is moving forward in the Texas Legislature that would make it easier to bring baseless lawsuits against Internet users in the state who review businesses, speak anonymously, or otherwise exercise their First Amendment rights. If you’re a Texan, we need you to contact your … | Continue reading
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is representing an anonymous Reddit commenter who is facing an abusive copyright claim from the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, a group that publishes doctrines for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Today, EFF filed a motion to quash … | Continue reading
The Save the Internet Act (H.R. 1644) has survived its first vote, 18-11. This is a victory for everyone who wants strong, real net neutrality protections. It is, as is so often the case in the net neutrality battle, a win for the majority of Americans who support these protectio … | Continue reading
In a stunning rejection of the will five million online petitioners, and over 100,000 protestors this weekend, the European Parliament has abandoned common-sense and the advice of academics, technologists, and UN human rights experts, and approved the Copyright in the Digital Sin … | Continue reading
In a stunning rejection of the will five million online petitioners, and over 100,000 protestors this weekend, the European Parliament has abandoned common-sense and the advice of academics, technologists, and UN human rights experts, and approved the Copyright in the Digital Sin … | Continue reading
Some of the most controversial technologies government agencies use to surveil the public or automate decisions about them are developed or overseen by private parties.Whether it’s automated license plate readers (ALPRs), cell-site simulators, or algorithmic tools used by federal … | Continue reading
TikTok is an app that makes it easy for people to make short lip-synching videos, which unsurprisingly makes it a goldmine of creativity and memes. TikTok recently got in hot water with the Federal Trade Commission because it failed to comply with Children’s Online Privacy Protec … | Continue reading
Earlier this week, EFF filed a brief in one of the first cases to consider whether the use of automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology implicates the Fourth Amendment. Our amicus brief, filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in United States v. Yang, argues that when … | Continue reading
We have a real, coming broadband access crisis in the United States. Data from the government and independent analysis show that we are falling behind the world. This crisis comes from the fact that fiber-to-the-home deployment, the alternative to your gigabit cable monopoly (if … | Continue reading
The world of fiber optic connections will radically transform health care, education, urban administration and services, agriculture, retail sales, and offices. In a fascinating account combining policy expertise with on‑the‑ground reporting, Susan Crawford reveals how the corpor … | Continue reading
With only days to go before the final EU debate and vote on the new Copyright Directive (we're told the debate will be at 0900h CET on Tuesday, 27 March, and the vote will happen at 1200h CET), things could not be more urgent and fraught. That's why today's announcement by Poland … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, the New York Times published a major story reporting that the NSA has stopped using the authority to run its massive, ongoing surveillance of Americans’ telephone records. After years of fighting mass surveillance of telephone records, the story may make our j … | Continue reading
Hiperderecho, the leading digital rights organization in Peru, in collaboration with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, today launched its second ¿Quien Defiende Tus Datos? (Who Defends Your Data?), an evaluation of the privacy practices of the Internet Service Providers (ISPs.. … | Continue reading
We’re into the final days before members of the European Parliament vote on the Copyright and the Digital Single Market Directive, home of the censoring Article 13, and the anti-news Article 11. Europeans are still urging their MEPs to vote down these articles (if you haven’t alr … | Continue reading
The EU's Copyright Directive will be voted on in the week of March 25 (our sources suggest the vote will take place on March 27th, but that could change); the Directive has been controversial all along, but it took a turn for the catastrophic during the late stages of the negotia … | Continue reading
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) requires the California Attorney General to take input from the public on regulations to implement the law, which does not go into effect until 2020.The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed comments on two issues: first, how to verif … | Continue reading
During the week of March 25, the European Parliament will hold the final vote on the Copyright Directive, the first update to EU copyright rules since 2001; normally this would be a technical affair watched only by a handful of copyright wonks and industry figures, but the Direct … | Continue reading
Shopping Centers Shut Down ALPR Program After Denying Data Was Shared with ICE. New Emails Show ICE Did Access Data Through a Fusion Center. In response to an ACLU report on how law enforcement agencies share information collected by automated license plate readers (ALPRs) with.. … | Continue reading
Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal last summer, consumer data privacy has been a hot topic in Congress. The witness table has been dominated by the biggest platforms, with those in lockstep with the tech giants earning the vast majority of attention. However, this week ma … | Continue reading
EFF is deeply saddened and disturbed by the massacre in New Zealand. We offer our condolences to the survivors and families of victims.This horrific event had an online component; one gunman livestreamed the event, and it appears that he had an active and hateful online presence. … | Continue reading
A bill introduced in Texas threatens the free speech rights of 28 million residents by making it easier to bring frivolous lawsuits against speakers and to harass or intimidate them into silence. EFF has long been concerned about these types of lawsuits, called Strategic Lawsuits … | Continue reading
Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new “privacy-focused” direction for the company that, while sounding great in theory, also set off several alarm bells—including concerns about competition as the company moves to make its messaging properties indistinguishable … | Continue reading
We urged the Florida Supreme Court yesterday to review a closely-watched lawsuit to clarify the due process rights of defendants identified by facial recognition algorithms used by law enforcement. Specifically, we told the court that when facial recognition is secretly used on p … | Continue reading
Last month, we asked EFF supporters to help save Alice v. CLS Bank, the 2014 Supreme Court decision that has helped stem the tide of stupid software patents and abusive patent litigation. The Patent Office received hundreds of comments from you, telling it to do the right thing a … | Continue reading
Recognizing the year’s worst in government transparencyThe cause of government transparency finally broke through to the popular zeitgeist this year. It wasn’t an investigative journalism exposé or a civil rights lawsuit that did it, but a light-hearted sitcom about a Taiwanese A … | Continue reading
No excuse is needed to celebrate the civil rights icon Rev. Fred Shuttleworth. But this weekend is an especially appropriate time to recognize his contributions to First Amendment jurisprudence, and the inextricable link between modern free speech law and the civil rights movemen … | Continue reading
In his latest announcement, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg embraces privacy and security fundamentals like end-to-end encrypted messaging. But announcing a plan is one thing. Implementing it is entirely another. And for those reading between the lines of Zuckerberg’s pivot-to-priva … | Continue reading
When the FCC announced its intention to repeal the 2015 Open Internet Order, Americans spoke up. When the FCC ignored the fact that most Americans support net neutrality, Americans spoke up again, asking Congress to reverse the FCC’s decision. And the Senate listened. This fight … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, OpenAI revealed an impressive language model that can generate paragraphs of believable text. It declined to fully release their research “due to concerns about malicious applications of the technology.” OpenAI released a much smaller model and technical paper … | Continue reading
When we publicly demanded that Facebook stop messing with users’ phone numbers last week, we weren’t expecting the social network to double down quite like this: By default, anyone can use the phone number that a user provides for two-factor authentication (2FA) to find that user … | Continue reading
In back-to-back hearings last week, the House and the Senate discussed what, if anything, Congress should do about online privacy. Sounds fine—until you see who they invited. Congress should be seeking out multiple, diverse perspectives. But last week, both chambers largely invit … | Continue reading
German Data Privacy Commissioner Ulrich Kelber is also a computer scientist, which makes him uniquely qualified to comment on the potential consequences of the proposed new EU Copyright Directive. The Directive will be voted on at the end of this month, and its Article 13 require … | Continue reading
Due to an editing error, a draft version of this article was published prematurely.Internet websites and forums are continuing to censor speech with adult content on their platforms to avoid running afoul of the new anti-sex trafficking law FOSTA. The measure’s vague, ambiguous l … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, security researcher Victor Gevers found and disclosed an exposed database live-tracking the locations of about 2.6 million residents of Xinjiang, China, offering a window into what a digital surveillance state looks like in the 21st century.Xinjiang is China’s … | Continue reading
Three years ago, we warned of a string of dangerous new policy proposals on the horizon. Under these proposals, platforms would be forced to implement copyright bots that sniffed all of the media that users uploaded to them, deleting your uploads with no human review.It’s happeni … | Continue reading
What if we allowed some people to patent the law and then demand money from the rest of us just for following it?As anyone with a basic understanding of democratic principles can see, that is a terrible idea. In a democracy, elected representatives write laws that apply to everyo … | Continue reading
Recent elections across the Americas from the United States to Brazil have stirred fears about the impact of “fake news”. Earlier this month, EFF made a submission to the Organization of American States (OAS), the pan-American institution currently investigating the extent and i … | Continue reading